


eating brains doesn’t make you a monster (it takes a little more effort)

by notbecauseofvictories



Category: iZombie (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Drug Use, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-27
Updated: 2015-10-27
Packaged: 2018-04-28 12:25:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5090672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blair DeBeers is born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and spends the next thirty years trying to spit it out before someone chokes her with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	eating brains doesn’t make you a monster (it takes a little more effort)

Blair DeBeers, her father declared after she showed up late for dinner at the club with a Nirvana t-shirt under her blazer, vodka on her breath, was born to be a disappointment.

Blair DeBeers,her mother sighed, when she was caught in the coat closet with her hand up another debutante’s skirt, would never learn not to lash out at the world when she was unhappy. ( _Instead of letting it slowly poison me?_ Blair almost asked, but she wasn’t that cruel yet, had no practice in tearing at the sadness her mother wore like a second skin. That came later.) _  
_

_Blair DeBeers_ , her grandfather said with a whistle, when she showed him her new tongue stud and said she was going to take their company back, just watch _. Blair, you could swallow the world whole and still come up looking for seconds._  


(She would tell it like something like this:  


Blair DeBeers is born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and spends the next thirty years trying to spit it out before someone chokes her with it.)

.

Blair is very young when she learns to smile like her father, all teeth and dead eyes.  


Her mother tells her to stop, it’s not ladylike, but then her mother rarely comes out of her room these days. She isn’t exactly around to see.  


.  


Blair sidles into Stanford on her father’s legacy, majors in casually dealing ecstasy and the way girls at parties arch their backs, riding the bad side of a chemical high and dancing until they’re gone, lost in their skin and out of their heads— _bacchanalian_ , possessed by madness and the divine. She loves that look, fucked a dozen sorority sisters and miscellaneous coeds whose names she never learned chasing it.  


She’s still hungover from the night before when the Dean of the college calls her into his office, and tells her he is very sorry for her loss. The _Seattle Times_ is more explicit, _WIFE OF HIGHLANDS BUSINESSMAN COMMITS SUICIDE_ , and that photo from last year’s benefit, aforementioned wife, with husband and doting child all smiling for the camera; the beautiful lie of the DeBeers.  


Blair doesn’t remember much of the following week, except Angus making a show of embracing her at the wake only to hiss in her ear, _jesus christ are you drunk_ _you couldn’t even do this one thing—_  


and then the bathroom of the funeral parlor, where she threw up, again and again; only her father’s assistant there with her, making circles on her back with one hand and checking messages on his phone with the other.

.  


She graduates (barely) and her father pulls every string he’s got to get her into Wharton, despite middling grades and lack of extracurriculars other than possession with intent to distribute. (It does not occur to him to ask if she wants to go. He wants her to, and therefore.) She spends half a semester staring out the window of her microeconomics class before walking out sometime before Thanksgiving.

Her father never forgives her. She never forgets how she saw her future, as written by Angus DeBeers, emblazoned on the beige wall of that classroom—an MBA, a job at a publishing company or an arts foundation (something respectable, but still _feminine_ ; Blair was never going to inherit her father’s venture capital company, are you insane?)  


Marriage to the right sort of man, well-behaved children. Decades of photos from benefits and charity dinners and arts functions and weekends at the cabin, all lined up on the mantle. The beautiful lie of the DeBeers, propagated.

Blair would rather swallow razor blades. She never looks back.  


.

_You always were a crazy bitch,_ her father spits.

_And you said mom and I had nothing in common,_ Blair says with a smile, all teeth.  


.  


It’s February and cold as Satan’s tits when her credit runs out. Her dealer finds her trying to live off coffee and wheedle money from her father’s latest assistant, who hasn’t been told she and Angus are fighting right now. _This is sad, princess,_ Dougie says, sliding into the booth across from her. She sneers at him. _No wonder Mr. Boss wants to see you._  


The Boss is nothing like she imagined, the shadowy figure only alluded to in conversation, or vague stories told mostly under one’s breath. He is clean-shaven and unassuming, his head bent over spreadsheets and one hand on a calculator. He looks more like an accountant than a kingpin. (He also sets Blair’s skin crawling, and it’s the first time she’s been near power she wasn’t sure how to harness.)  


Dougie shuts the door behind her.  


_Miss DeBeers,_ Mr. Boss says, looking at her over the tops of his glasses. _My belated congratulations on your graduation. And welcome to the installment plan._

This, Blair learns, is an alternate pronunciation of “indentured servitude.”  


.  


She’s white and attractive and clean, from a good family, with a college degree—there are doors that open to her, gated communities whose gates swing open at her coming. She’s the Boss’ attempt at breaking into new markets, with clients that are willing to pay better for a better product, a better high, a better edge.  


(Halfway across the city, Vaughn Du Clark is proposing a similar strategy to the board members of Max Rager.)

For the first time in her life, Blair shuts up and does what she’s told, fascinated by the way the Boss’ well-oiled machine ticks—which politicians and policemen look the other way, the careful interchange of power and wealth and product. She buys a butterfly knife that fits in her pocket and thinks of what her grandfather said, about swallowing the world and asking for seconds.  


Fuck it all, she is _hungry_.  


.

Blair’s grandfather dies in a sterile room, hooked up to machines that beep and groan and seem to quietly suckle the life from him. She’s there, of course she’s there, every time he cracks his gummed eyes open and asks in a whisper, _Angus?  
_

_No,_ she says, _no granddad, it’s me. It’s Blair._ But he only shuts his eyes again, and sighs into sleep. He goes, and her father never comes.  


.

Dying, Blair discovers, is a lot like falling asleep, except louder, with more screaming and fire.  


Birth, on the other hand is all running, and hunger _._  


.  


It’s easier than she would have thought, smashing someone’s skull open on the pavement. Or maybe she’s too hungry, the world blurry through a haze of red and withdrawal pangs, to notice any flailings of her conscience. She’d only got that B in Ethics because she blew the professor, anyway.  


(After the seventh time, some kid from the skatepark and a meat hook in his chest she’s more certain. It really is that easy.)  


.

Death is strange. Her heartbeat has gone long and slow, the blood doesn’t rush in her ears anymore. She doesn’t realize it until she tries to fall asleep, and finds herself listening for white noise no longer there.  


Blair goes through her father’s entire cellar, uncorking hundred dollar wines one by one. They all taste like ash, and she pours them out onto the hard-packed earth.  


.  


Liv Moore—and isn’t that just the perfect name for her, pale as death and haloed by morgue lights, the latest punchline in the joke that has become Blair’s life—Liv Moore is the kind of girl that makes Blair want to dig her fingernails into her life and _yank_. She wants to fuck her up.  


(Well. Apparently she already did, and hard. Check that off the to-do list.)

Liv Moore doesn’t trust her around her pretty scientist, and Liv Moore blames Blair for turning her into a zombie; Liv Moore finds her at the wrong time, when Dougie hunts Blair down for not making her quota for the week. They part ways prickly and off-balance, still dead. And Blair is alone.

(Well, fine. As Aretha sang it, sisters are doin’ it for themselves.)  


.

Blair DeBeers creates her own supply and demand, with a nail, with a kiss, a mouthful of blood, a tainted needle. She almost doesn’t notice how sluggish and weakly the drugs move through her dead system these days, because she’s high, she’s flying. (Daddy dearest never built an empire, never controlled the means of production and distribution both. Angus DeBeers _wishes_.)  


Every company has a couple bodies in the basement; hers are just more literal than most. And hanging in the meat locker.  


.

Side note, killing a national hero is shockingly easy. A dress that plunges for her, one too many scotch and sodas laced with rohypnol for him. She keeps Major Tom in the meat locker for 72 hours to get the drugs out of his system—benzodiazepines tend to give brain tissue a nasty aftertaste, and a million dollars buys some serious quality control.  


She’s gotten good at _in vivo_ craniotomies.

See? Easy.

.

Major Lilywhite is very pretty, and pretty reckless. In another life, Blair would have liked winning him, piece by piece—she plays the poor little rich girl well, it’s all big eyes and badly-hidden vulnerability, someone for him to _save_ from her empty, opulent life. He’d enjoy that. She’d enjoy having him.  


But that was then. This is now, and instead she keeps him shivering in the meat locker, stacking his dead orphans against the back wall so that he can admire her work.  


_(It takes more than eating brains to make you a monster,_ she says as he retches up the medulla oblongata soup. _I would have thought that was obvious.)_  


.  


Fast-forward, this is how it ends:

Liv Moore jams a needle in Blair DeBeer’s thigh and suddenly everything _hurts,_ every inch of skin and especially the bullet wound in her side, and she is hungry, and thirsty, she has to piss and sleep and it’s all she can do not to buckle under the weight of it all, her body jolting back to life.  


She doesn’t remember humanity being this overwhelming.

She nearly faints once or twice, dragging herself to a nearby hospital. Every time she has to resisting the urge to vomit the burritos she scarfed on the way—her body is demanding too many things at once, nausea and hunger, pain and how did she ever _manage_ this?

She’s missed the food though. She spends the next week locked in her apartment, ordering delivery from every restaurant in the area and watching the footage of the Meat Cute “gas leak.” She doesn’t answer her phone, and hopes that Liv gets the fucking zombie apocalypse she so desperately desires.

On Monday, she wakes up to a blank ceiling and a voicemail from Angus, asking where the hell his weekly shipment is. ( _you couldn’t even do this one thing—_ ) Blair gets up, her joints aching, and hobbles to the bathroom. She splashes water on her face and knocks back the antibiotics the doctor prescribed.  


In the mirror, she looks tired and washed-out—her hair is still ash blonde, and it looks alien now that her skin is back to regular flesh tone. She watches her chest rise and fall, and the blood rushes in her ears like a bass line.

Birth, she remembers, is running, and hunger.  


Slowly, she smiles.  


.

(Blair DeBeers was born to swallow the silver spoon, and the world with it. Just watch her.)  


**Author's Note:**

> originally posted at notbecauseofvictories.tumblr.com/post/132031386395


End file.
